Trung Phan Profile picture
Jul 9 6 tweets 5 min read Read on X
New York City paid Mckinsey $4m to conduct a feasibility study on whether trash bins are better than leaving garbage on the street.

The deck is 95-slides long and titled “The Future of Trash”.

Some highlights:

▫️The official term is “containerization”, which is the “storage of waste in sealed, rodent-proof receptacles rather than in plastic bags placed directly on the curb.”

▫️Two main types of containerization: 1) individual bins for low density locales; 2) shared containers for high-density.

▫️NYC needs to clean up 24,000,000lbs of garbage a day

▫️Containerization has only become the norm worldwide in major cities in the past 15 years.

▫️New York City first considered containerization in the 1970s but never conducted a feasibility study until now (Mckinsey’s sales team has been dropping the ball)

▫️Key considerations for container viability:

• POPULATION DENSITY: NYC has 30k residents per square mile (more dense than comparable big cities)

• BUILT ENVIRONMENT: Few places to “hide” containers due to history of infrastructure development.

• WEATHER: Snow creates challenges for “mechanized collection” in the winter.

• CURB SPACE: Mostly taken up by bus stops, bike lanes, outdoor dining and fire hydrants.

• COLLECTION FREQUENCY: NYC needs to double frequency of pick-up for estimated speed of trash that bins would accumulate.

• FLEET: A new garbage truck will needs to be designed to collect rolling bins at scale.

▫️ The proposed solution (literally garbage bins and shared containers) covers 89% of NYC streets and 77% of residential tonnage.

▫️The three case studies — because you gotta have solid case studies — are Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona.

▫️There is a slide called “Why containerization matters” and three reasons are “rats”, “pedestrian obstruction” and “dirty streets” (the 21-year intern that did this slide billed at prob $10k an hour is my hero).

The study is actually pretty interesting.

I have no idea if $4m is a rip-off to learn that “yeah, we should put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it” but I would have happily done it for 10-20% of that budget (and come to a similar conclusion).Image
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It is actually an interesting deck. Just the thought of a 20-year old newly grad getting billed at an obscene rate to say”rats get to garbage” is kinda funny

Four more solid slides:
— By the numbers (daily garbage = 140 Statue of Liberty a day!!)
— City comparison
— Container comparison (looks like they did select the “scalable” trash bin)
— Curb side analysis

Full deck here: dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/upl…Image
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Think Mckinsey telling NY to “put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it and people can walk” will work out better than when it told AT&T in 1981 that cellphones would be “niche.”

That cost AT&T $13B and one worst business predictions ever as I wrote here: readtrung.com/p/the-worst-te…
Put it in the Louvre Image
Here’s the full link again:

And enjoy these case studies for Paris, Amsterdam and Barcelona. dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/upl…


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More from @TrungTPhan

Jun 23
The Economist latest cover story on solar energy is packed with interesting stats. 

▫️Solar energy will be the primary source of human energy use by 2040

▫️$500B spent on buying and installing solar panels in 2024 (nearly same “sum being put into upstream oil and gas”)

▫️Solar on track to produce “more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032”

▫️Since the 1960s…the levelised cost of solar energy—the break-even price a project needs to get paid in order to recoup its financing for a fixed rate of return—has dropped by a factor of more than 1,000

▫️From the mid-1970s to the early 2020s cumulative shipments of photovoltaics increased by a factor of a million, which is 20 doublings. 

▫️Over the same span, the “prices dropped by a factor of 500. That is a 27% decrease in costs for each doubling of installed capacity, which means a halving of costs every time installed capacity increases by 360%.”

▫️The cost of a kilowatt-hour of battery storage has fallen by 99% over the past 30 years.

The chart below — which they made vertical (kind of weird) — shows global useful energy consumption over the past century.

I’ll add two more posts after this one with excerpts on obstacles and opportunities.

Full link: economist.com/interactive/es…Image
Obstacles from abundance of solar: economist.com/interactive/es…
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Opportunities from solar abundance:

— A lot of A/C for Sub-Saharan African (need 2TW of new solar just for Africa to reach India level of electricity use)
— Filter air continuously (reduce spread of airborne diseases)
— Carbon removal
— Water desalination
— AI/Data energy needs Image
Read 5 tweets
May 20
Details from Red Lobster’s bankruptcy filing are wild and so much mismanagement:

▫️$1B in debt, $30m in cash
▫️Previous PE owner sold land and leased it back to Red Lobster at “above market rates”
▫️$20 Endless Shrimp cost it $11m but the interesting part is that one of the chain’s owners is Thai seafood firm Thai Union (which also owns Chicken By The Sea) and it may have used Endless shrimp to dump its own shrimp supply through the 578 restaurants in North America
▫️Thai Union became the only Red Lobster shrimp vendor, overcharging for shrimp and skipping quality reviews (Thai Union has written off its $500m+ investment)
▫️Red Lobster has had 5 CEO in the last 5 years (!!!)
▫️Sales down 30% since 2019

Link: document.epiq11.com/document/getdo…Image
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Red Lobster needed Yukitaka Yamaguchi — aka Japan’s Tuna King (sleeps 3 hours a day and knows where any fish is from on a single bite) — to run quality control.

This dude would not have put up with low-quality seafood slop. readtrung.com/p/becoming-the…
Also, never forget Beyoncé name dropped Red Lobster with some R-rated verses in 2016 (“Formation”) and Red Lobster social responded and there was actually a brief sales surge.


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Read 6 tweets
Apr 4
Steve Cohen’s setup includes renting a 2nd hotel room when he travels so his team can re-build a replica of his 12-monitor work station for him in it. Image
From the book Black Edge:

And here are some details from a former SAC employee: amazon.ca/Black-Edge-Ins…
observer.com/2017/02/sac-ca…
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I also have a 12-monitor setup to help research app customers reset their passwords.Bearly.AI
Read 4 tweets
Apr 3
Francis Ford Coppola’s new film “Megalopolis” cost $120m and he self-financed it (including money from selling his winery). 

Coppola is a legend of “going all in” and “putting skin in the game”. 

The GOAT example is “Apocalypse Now”, his classic 1979 war film with arguably the most insane production story ever. 

Let’s rewind to 1975, the year Copolla turned 36: he is on top of Hollywood after directing “The Godfather” (1972) and “The Godfather II” (1974). 

What does Coppola choose to do next? Make a film about the Vietnam War. The script was based on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, the 1889 novel about the horrors of colonialism in the Belgian Congo.

The major studios all said “no” to Coppola’s pitch for three major reasons:

1️⃣ He wanted full creative control
2️⃣ He wanted to own all of the film rights
3️⃣ The Fall of Saigon happened in April 1975 and the American audience wasn’t exactly asking for a Vietnam War film (the studios wanted Coppola to make another Mafia flick)

Coppola was undeterred and made a huge bet.

“The Godfather II” cost $14m and the director estimated that “Apocalypse Now” would be the same budget. 

He put up $7m (mostly from those sweet Godfather checks) and raised another $7m from United Artists (which bought domestic distribution rights for ~7 years). 

But the project was a disaster from the start. 

Filming started in The Philippines in March 1976 and was supposed to last 3-4 months…it would take 16 months: 

▫️Harvey Keitel was the initial lead but Coppola fired him after one week.

▫️Martin Sheen (Captain Willard) took the lead role but drank so much on set that he gave himself a stress-induced heart attack and almost died. 

▫️Dennis Hopper was doing 3g of coke and 20+ drinks a day while on set (him and Marlon Brandon also hated each other).

▫️A typhoon destroyed 80% of the set and delayed filming for 2-3 months. 

▫️Actual dead bodies — stolen from a local grave — were used on set and the Filipino government and its strongman leader Ferdinand Marcos threatened to shut down production after finding out. 

▫️Marlon Brando (Col. Kurtz) demanded a huge fee ($3m+ for 3 weeks of work and 10% of the film’s gross). He then showed up late, asked for rewrites, declined to read Conrad’s book and was so overweight that the costumes wouldn’t fit (to obscure his heft, Copolla filmed Brando in the shadows and had him wear oversized dark clothing).

The budget ballooned to over $30m.

To maintain creative control and maintain all the film rights, Coppola mortgaged his home and borrowed money against his ownership in The Godfather. 

After the success of “Star Wars” (1977), Coppola even asked his friend and business partner George Lucas — who was originally tapped to direct Apocalypse — for some funds.

I repeat: Coppola went ALL THE WAY IN and had SKIN IN THE GAME.

His wife Eleanor took recorded video of all the insanity and the footage was turned into a 1991 documentary (“Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse”).

The total cost for the film — including marketing spend — reached $45m.

Against all odds, Coppola finished the project and the film was released in August 1979. It grossed $105m and Coppola would make a fortune on future DVD, Home Video and other ancillary revenue streams (below is a trailer for a re-mastered cut from 2019).

During the Cannes Festival in May 1979, Coppola famously said of the film: “The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”
Coppola also said at Cannes that “My movie is not *about* Vietnam. My movie *is* Vietnam”.

It’s def one of the best films ever but that is … a stretch of a comparison.

Anyways, the making of The Godfather was also insane and I wrote about that here: readtrung.com/p/the-godfathe…
If you want more on Apocalypse Now, I went on Jim O'Shaughnessy’s “Infinite Loops” podcast with Rob Henderson to talk about the making and psychology of the film. open.spotify.com/episode/38OYIn…
Read 4 tweets
Mar 10
When Iron Man came out in 2008, Robert Downey Jr. was *not* a marquee star.

He was rebuilding his career and paid a below market rate of $500k.

But the deal terms set him up for one of the great acting comebacks ever (while earnings $450m+ as Tony Stark).

Here’s the story 🧵
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) we know today was a long shot in the early 2000s.

Marvel was a public co. coming off bankruptcy in 1996 and had sold rights to its best IP (Spiderman, X-Men, Fantastic 4)

From 2000-07, films based on the IP minted cash but Marvel made little: Image
In the early-90s, Downey Jr. was one of the brightest young stars in Hollywood, receiving a Best Actor nomination for "Charlie Chaplin" in 1992 (@ 27yrs old).

In the 2nd half of the decade, though, he dealt with drug addiction, arrests and jail stints before going clean in 2003. Image
Read 20 tweets

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